Yes, there would be some benefits to provide the new drivers as an opt-in alternative, i.e. enabled in the build configuration but blacklisted to prevent automatic loading:
- Asynchronous performance of 1394a buses (a.k.a. FireWire 400) is indeed considerably higher in the new firewire drivers.
- They are more secure due to physical DMA filtering and possibly finer-grained character device file permissions.
- Having the new drivers may help when trying to debug issues with FireWire devices.
- Upstream development activities are focused on the new drivers.
- Advanced users of pro/ semi-pro FireWire applications may be interested to try the new drivers.
However,the new drivers are of lesser usefulness on distributions which still provide libraw1394 v1 instead of v2. SBP-2 (storage) devices would indeed be the only device class that can be accessed through the new drivers without libraw1394 v2 and libdc1394 v2.
Yes, there would be some benefits to provide the new drivers as an opt-in alternative, i.e. enabled in the build configuration but blacklisted to prevent automatic loading:
- Asynchronous performance of 1394a buses (a.k.a. FireWire 400) is indeed considerably higher in the new firewire drivers.
- They are more secure due to physical DMA filtering and possibly finer-grained character device file permissions.
- Having the new drivers may help when trying to debug issues with FireWire devices.
- Upstream development activities are focused on the new drivers.
- Advanced users of pro/ semi-pro FireWire applications may be interested to try the new drivers.
However,the new drivers are of lesser usefulness on distributions which still provide libraw1394 v1 instead of v2. SBP-2 (storage) devices would indeed be the only device class that can be accessed through the new drivers without libraw1394 v2 and libdc1394 v2.